Vanished Smile (5 page)

But under intense questioning, Paupardin did recall a visitor who came to call often, as if paying court. The scent of oleander returned to the old guard, and he described in some detail the young man, German or maybe Austrian, as opaquely handsome as a marble statue, always neatly dressed, blond hair combed, slight but well proportioned, quiet, always alone, and always with eyes for only one. No words passed between them, only a bouquet.

Thursday, August 24

IN 1793, JUST STEPS FROM THE PLACE
where Mona Lisa vanished, beautiful Charlotte Corday was sentenced to death for the assassination of the revolutionary theorist Jean-Paul Marat. Charlotte stabbed Marat in his bathtub and faced the guillotine with no regrets. She accepted her fate with such grace and courage that she captivated a romantic German student in the crowd of onlookers. Meeting her unflinching gray eyes, Adam Lux lost his heart and his head. He published a pamphlet denouncing her execution, and when he was arrested, he demanded to die as she had. He implored the Revolutionary Tribunal to send him to the same guillotine so their blood would mingle. He received his wish.

When
Le Matin
, one of the city's largest morning papers, reported that police were searching for a young German whose infatuation may have turned to obsession, Paris had a new Adam Lux. Prefect Lépine confirmed to reporters that the boy had visited Mona Lisa often enough for the guard in the Salon Carré to provide a detailed description. Curator of paintings Paul Leprieur added colorful embellishments. It was true that Mona Lisa often made men do strange things. There were more than one million artworks in the Louvre collection; she alone received her own mail. Mona Lisa received many love letters, and for a time they were so ardent that she was placed under police protection. The year before, a hopeless admirer, facing a lifetime of unrequited love, had shot himself in front of her.

A young man, and a German, crazed by love. It was the stuff of myth. In the popular press, the calculated crime was
rewritten as a tender love affair. As news of the romance spread around the world, Mona Lisa became a passionate participant in her own disappearance. The
Chicago Tribune
entertained readers with a whimsical report of her elopement:

The fatal-attraction theory appealed to the French heart and softened the loss. If Mona Lisa was gone, at least she had been stolen for love.

AS THE INVESTIGATION
entered its second day, every clue, however tenuous, was magnified. Every memory, every detail, took on significance and seemed to both freeze and meld, as if distinct art movements had converged on that summer day. The loss of the Renaissance masterpiece was recalled like an Impressionist painting. Parisians strolling along the quai or
crossing the Pont des Arts that August Monday described a uniformed guard snoozing in front of the museum in the shade of a red umbrella.

A department store employee who was walking on the Quai du Louvre about seven-thirty a.m. had a vivid memory of a man with an odd gait and a bulky package under his arm, speeding toward the Pont du Carrousel. He was neither walking nor running but appeared to be moving at more of a canter along the Louvre side of the street. All at once and without slowing his pace, he tossed something small and shiny into the garden along the side of the museum. The witness could not say with certainty if the man continued on or turned to cross the bridge.

A second witness recalled a man, also carrying a bulky package, sweating profusely and rushing to catch the seven-forty express train for Bordeaux at the Gare d'Orsay The glass-enclosed Beaux Arts terminal (now a museum) was just across the river from the Louvre. The seven-forty made fourteen stops on the nine-hour route from Paris to Bordeaux, and connecting trains could carry the thief out of the country as far as Madrid or Lisbon.

The two witnesses were painting the same clear picture until they began to describe the suspect. One recalled a trim middle-aged man of medium height, between forty and fifty, without hat or mustache. The other described a tall, heavyset man with a dark mustache, wearing a dark suit and a straw hat, in a state of extreme agitation.

Elements of each story were quickly corroborated. The Louvre's chief carpenter recalled passing through the Salon Carré with two new assistants at approximately seven o'clock, the start of their Monday shift. He pointed out Mona Lisa to them. When they returned around eight-thirty, she was gone, and he joked to the men, “Mona Lisa has been taken away for fear we would steal her.”

A museum plumber named Sauve mentioned that a knob had been missing from the stairway door opening into the Cour du Sphinx—the same stairs where the frames were discovered. On Monday morning, Sauve had found a worker waiting at the foot of the stairs for someone to open the door. Sauve obliged, using his key and a pair of pliers to unlock it, and advised the other man to leave the door ajar so that no one else would be stuck. Police detectives raked through the garden behind the museum and retrieved a small, shiny object. It was a brass doorknob.

The plumber's behavior aroused suspicion. Sauve had not reported the missing doorknob until considerably later in the day, and he could not describe the other man clearly. The plumber was vague on every point except one: The man worked at the Louvre. He was wearing a white employee smock.

The brass doorknob raised as many questions as it answered. Why would the thief toss it into the garden where it would be easy to find? If he continued walking along the Quai du Louvre, why didn't he cross the street and drop the knob in the river? If he crossed the bridge, why didn't he drop it over the side? Mixing the descriptions of the two suspects like colors on a palette, Prefect Lépine dispatched an urgent bulletin to Bordeaux, but his direct authority ended at the outskirts of the capital.

France had two national police forces—the Prefecture de Paris, with jurisdiction over the city and its environs; and the Sûreté Nationale, responsible for maintaining law and order throughout the country. The Sûreté, under the direction of Inspector Octave Hamard, pursued leads and suspects beyond the Paris area. The two agencies were frequently in conflict. Hamard was a blustering man with an ample waist and a more than ample temper who still had the rough edges of a street cop. Lépine was as much a politician as a policeman. There was little rapport between them and little cooperation between
the forces. Rivalry was inbred, and detectives from the two agencies guarded information and tried to discredit each other.

Friday, August 25

MONA LISA HAD THE
most famous face in the world, and the most uncertain identity. Who was she? What was her relationship to Leonardo, and what was the secret of her smile? Generations of art historians had puzzled over her many aspects. Now there was an urgent new mystery to plumb: Where was she? Who took her, and most perplexing of all, why?

When Mona Lisa slipped out of her frames, she seemed to change from a missing masterpiece to a missing person. She came alive in the popular imagination. The public felt her loss as emotionally as an abduction or a kidnapping. Captivated by her mystery and romance, crowds gathered outside the Louvre each day, awaiting word from the prisonlike fortress that had failed to keep her safe. More people jammed Rue de Rivoli than ever visited the museum when it was open. Mona Lisa had always seemed
più vita che la vivacità
—more alive than life itself. The first description ever written of her said, “She does not appear to be painted, but truly of flesh and blood.”
^∗2

One French paper after another promised generous rewards for her return. The popular weekly pictorial
L'Illustration
offered ten thousand francs ($40,000) for information and forty thousand francs ($160,000) if the painting were returned to the newspaper office, both good for one month, plus a bonus if the return was made by September 1.
L'Illustration
received more
than five hundred letters in a single day, and more than one hundred readers crowded the newsroom. The
Paris-Journal
, which also set a September i deadline, offered fifty thousand francs ($200,000) and a promise of anonymity to anyone who turned Mona Lisa in to the paper.

The government joined in with a reward of twenty-five thousand francs ($100,000). To angry and bereaved Parisians, it seemed a meager response to such a monumental loss. Henri Rochefort, a member of
les Amis du Louvre
, a group of wealthy museum patrons, told
Le Figaro
, “The Mona Lisa thief wants like all thieves to realize the price of his booty”
^∗3
He proposed a campaign to raise one million francs ($400 million today), and he personally pledged to double the government's reward.

THE POLICE HAD THE
FRAMES, a fingerprint, the date and approximate time of the theft, and a possible accomplice in the plumber Sauve, but they still had no idea how Mona Lisa had left the Louvre. She was not a canvas that could be rolled up and sneaked out of the museum or the country. Leonardo had painted her on a solid panel of white Lombardy poplar, twenty-one by thirty-one inches.

Mona Lisa would be difficult to conceal even without her frames, yet every exit guard insisted that she had not gone through his door. One attendant remembered stopping a workman with a wheelbarrow of trash around nine o'clock Monday morning and sifting through the debris. There was nothing
resembling the painting in the barrow. Eight possible exits from the Louvre and eight firm denials from the guards. Mona Lisa was gone, but was she stolen? Was the vanishing act a crime or a hoax? Initial shock turned quickly to suspicion that the painting was still on the premises.

A few months before, a reporter had spent a night in a sarcophagus to expose lax security at the Louvre. A museum has no absolute defense against a cunning thief or sure protection against a crazed vandal, yet even allowing for the inherent difficulties, the art treasures of France were poorly guarded. Louvre security was casual at best. One hundred passkeys that unlocked every door in the museum were floating around the building. There was no alarm system. The most valuable works were not secured to the walls in any way. There was no surveillance over the photo process. Paintings were not signed in or out. And the Louvre was packed with political appointees.

Was Mona Lisa's disappearance a prank to dramatize the problem? Or were disgruntled Louvre workers settling scores? They had just won a bruising battle to unionize, and emotions were raw on both sides. Worse yet, were curators covering up an unforgivable crime? According to this scenario, the beautiful face had been disfigured in a botched effort at conservation. The evidence was stashed in the bowels of the museum, and after a suitable period of mourning, the true Leonardo would be replaced with a copy.

The Louvre is the largest museum in the world and an enormous labyrinth, covering some forty-nine acres. It is three times the size of the Vatican including St. Peter's Basilica, and its length is equivalent to two Eiffel Towers laid end to end. Rue de Rivoli is on one side, the River Seine on the other. Tourists roaming its halls with Karl Baedeker's
Paris and Its Environs igio
would read that the picture galleries
displayed three thousand paintings, including multiple Rembrandts, Raphaels, Titians, and six of the thirteen easel paintings by Leonardo da Vinci.

Searching the entire museum complex consumed an army of inspectors and gendarmes. They were combing every gallery, storage room, stairwell, and closet, even the vast underground vaults, filled with discarded splendors and fashioned from the caves of the ancient wolf hunters who gave the Louvre its name.
^∗4
The search was proceeding meticulously, room by room, floor by floor.

Prefect Lépine vowed that if Mona Lisa were lost in the Louvre, his men would find her. Privately, though, he believed she was long gone. If the thieves had not used any of the exits, there was another possibility. A scaffold had been erected on the side of the museum where the first elevator was being installed. Although scrambling down scaffolding might not be the most ladylike means of egress, it offered an unguarded escape route.

FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER
Mona Lisa's absence was reported, there was still no demand for payment. If she was not a prisoner being held for ransom, the Paris picture magazine
L'Illustration
demanded to know, “What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction? And where is the present abode of this marvelous picture?”

Paris had more newspapers than any other city in the world, and at least as many theories. In the pages of the Paris
press, the crime was condemned as an assault, a scandal, and an act of anarchy. The papers kept the story alive in the public imagination and the pressure on the police. They prodded the investigators, excoriated the museum administration and the government, and concocted their own outlandish scenarios.

The New York Times
reported from Paris: “Feeling here about the affair is intense. An extraordinary number of absurd theories are advanced.” Mona Lisa was stashed in the Louvre as a practical joke, to make a point, or to hide a blunder. She had been kidnapped by a madman. She had eloped with a desperate lover.